as more and more companies move into agile transformations I thought it would
be useful to share some of my experience and my company's experience in helping companies
with their Agile transformations we've been helping companies with Agile transformations
specifically for about 10 years we've been helping companies with software development
transformations in general for about 20 years we've learned quite a bit over the years about
how to make these transformations successful in Agile transformations we see two
interpretations of the phrase agile transformation on the ground one interpretation really puts
the emphasis on Agile it is Agile transformation this is the most common interpretation there's
not much focus on transformation transformations that see the primary challenge of the transformation
is being about the details of Agile are the transformations that we see fail that is their
focused on the details of scrum or Kanban but really ignore the
transformation aspect, those don't tend to work out very well transformations the focus
on transformation tend to do better they recognize that Agile is important but the make or break
focus of the transformation is the transformation itself and that's what I'd like to talk about
in this talk what this talk is not about its not about the details of Agile practices it's
not about choosing the best unit testing tool or the details
of how to hold the daily standup meaning it's also not about the bigger picture items of
questions like how do you use Scrum effectively or how to use Kanban what it is about is about
transformation that is it about organizational change and what we what we have found is that
you'll run into this set of transformation issues described in this talk and the companion
talk no matter what kind of Agile transformation you have in mind so if
you're simply adopting practice like Scrum or Kanban you'll run into these issues if
you're taking a bigger change like moving to a scaling model like safe or less or dad
you will run into these issues there are two models that we think are useful to apply to
your agile transformation the change model and the adoption model I discuss the change
model in a different talk a companion talk in this talk I'd like to focus on the adoption
model
so let's move into the discussion of the adoption model the adoption model really comes up in
response to a common pattern that we see with transformations which looks kind of like this
step number one an organization commits to a change step number two they do an initial
pilot project for the change and the pilot project is successful so naturally as the
result of a successful pilot project they want to expand the use of that change and
so what they do is they
have a second or third project that attempts to make the change but that second or third
project doesn't do as well as the pilot it stumbles or fails the project might fail outright
the project team might abandon the change that is they simply stop using the change
they go back to old familiar practices or sometimes the organization can't even find
project teams that are willing to be the second or third project team and so they the change
really really stalls
right away because they can't find additional teams that actually want to use it there is
actually a really fairly tidy way to explain this dynamic and I think to overcome these
challenges and that's based on an adoption model this specific model is inspired by work
by Everett Rogers and then later by Geoffrey Moore is probably somewhat familiar to people
who have read the book crossing the chasm or the earlier and much more extensive book
by Everett Rogers diffusion
of innovation and the basic model looks like this the basic model says for any new practice
and this is really talking more about industries or larger groups the focus isn't really on
individual companies but that's what I'm gonna apply it to today any change starts out by
being adopted by innovators and if the change makes it through the innovators then it's
adopted by the
early adopters if it makes it through the early adopters then it moves into early majority
and then into the late majority and finally into the laggards the change can actually
stall at any one of these points but in general the adoption of the change moves from left
to right according to this model now Geoffrey Moore's contribution to this model is really
to identify what he called the chasm and that is to say that the gap between the early adopters
and the
early majority in terms of getting the change diffused is bigger than the gap between any
of the other pairs of adjacent adoption groups and so that's why he said his book was titled
crossing the chasm is that it's much more difficult to get the change to cross that
chasm than it is to cross the gap say between innovators and early adopters or between early
majority late majority and so on so typical applications of innovation diffusion are things
like
diffusion of new agricultural technologies indeed Everett Rogers said something to the
effect that it's impossible to write more than 25 words about diffusion of innovation
without talking about the US agricultural extension program really one of the premier
technology innovation organizations in the world we also talk of course with Geoffrey
Moore's work about market adoption of innovations what I would really like to talk about is
applying this innovation diffusion model to Agile transformations within individual organizations
so thinking of a diffusion of an innovation and Agile transformation has related topics
what we see is that different adopters within a single organization exhibit these different
preferences of different people in different groups in the innovation adoption sequence
so some adopters exhibit tendencies more like the innovators some adopters exhibit
tendencies more like the early adopters or the early majority or even the majority or
laggards and these different groups have different kinds of attributes so if we look at say the
innovators the far-left part of innovation adoption sequence the kinds of characteristics
the innovators tend to have more like this they tend to be adventurous they'd like to
try new things they are eager to try out new technologies or practices they actually
can cope with a high degree of uncertainty they are willing to put up with uncertainty
in exchange for getting into something that is new and cool before anybody else does they're
highly risk tolerance they're willing to have all kinds of things go wrong because going
through all those things that are going wrong actually creates the possibility that they
could experience the benefits of that new cool thing before other people do they tend
to fail
often and this is kind of a problem in a way because it actually costs them credibility
to people in the other categories people in their early majority late majority and laggard
category may not respect the innovators because they do in fact fail so often and the later
categories don't see the innovators so much as being the ones who were trying new things
they see the innovators is being wild and reckless and
irresponsible and that's just what it looks like from their point of view now if we move
to the early adopters they also exhibit some predictable kinds of attributes that are similar
to the innovators but not exactly the same they're also highly risk tolerant like the
innovators are there looking though for the big win they're still attracted to things
that are new and cool but they're attracted to them more because there's a potential to
get a really big
competitive win there they actually unlike the innovators tend to be respected opinion
leaders in their organizations people in the early majority actually look to them to see
if that technology or innovation is far enough along the line yet for them to think about
adopting it so they end up being role models for other people and other adopters in the
organization so the commonalities that innovators and early adopters have looked like this
they're attracted to innovation for the sake of novelty their attracted to it because it's
new they're looking for a big win they're not looking for incremental wins they're not
looking for base hits they're looking for home runs they're highly risk tolerance and
they share some attributes in their approach to change one attribute is they're highly
motivated to see the change work they want the innovation to be successful they want
the new cool thing
to be new and cool so that they can use it and they share that attribute they also willing
to exert substantial personal energy and personal initiative to make the change work and what
this means is that when they encounter obstacles with the change they're willing to learn about
it by reading seeking out colleagues they're going to exert personal energy and initiative
to overcome obstacles indeed they actually see challenges with the change as
opportunities to make the new thing work before others do so far from being put off by challenges
they actually run into them headlong the bottom line is that these people can succeed with
very little external support they are highly motivated to be successful highly motivated
to be successful specifically with the change now here's the $64 question for organizations
that want to do an Agile transformation guess who typically works on pilot projects
well the answer is the innovators and early adopters those are the people who are excited
by the new cool technology whether the new cool technology is Scrum 10 years ago or Kanban
five to ten years ago or whether it's safe or less or dad or something else it's the
innovators and early adopters who are staffing these pilot projects and so that sets up some
interesting challenges when we look at trying to propagate out a change to the later adoption
groups
the early majority and later groups they do not have the same attributes that the innovators
and early adopters do they tend to be cautious rather than adventurous they tend to want
to see someone else succeed with the change first the further to the right we get in the
adoption sequence they they want not only to see someone else succeed they want to see
everybody else succeed they want to think that there's no chance of failing with it
these folks do not like uncertainty and they are not very risk tolerant and they really
don't like to fail so they want a high assurance that when they adopt the change they are going
to be successful now the issue with all this is we're not just talking about the laggards
were talking about most of the people that is the right more than three-quarters of the
diagram if we compare and contrast the
attributes of the early majority or let's say the early adopters the two groups on the
left and the later adopters the three groups on the right the contrast looks kinda like
this the early adopters are attracted to innovation for the sake of innovation the early majority
and later are attracted to innovation for the sake of improved quality or productivity
they're not attracted to things that are new just
because they're new they want there to be a benefit that's different just from the novelty
of it the earlier adopters are looking for revolutionary game-changing gains they want
home runs the later adopters are looking for incremental gains they want assurance that
they're going to get a modest size gain rather than a chance that they might get a huge gain
the early adopters are risk tolerant or highly risk tolerant but the later adopters are
either not very risk tolerant they might be risk-averse or they might even be highly risk-averse
by the time we get out to the right side of the innovation adoption sequence the earlier
adopters are highly motivated to make the change work the later adopters range from
being moderately motivated to see the change work to being actually motivated to see the
change fail now when I say it as motivated to
see the change fail that makes it sound like they're evil they're not really evil what
they're really motivated to do is to keep things the same to not change and so it's
not really that they want to see the change fail it's that they want evidence that they
don't have to change there's no reason to change so that they can keep things the way
that are familiar and comfortable the early adopters are willing to exert a lot of personal
energy and initiative to make
the change work the later adopters are really not willing to exert very much personal energy
to make the change work in fact they tend to see the need for that is evidence that
the change isn't going to work or isn't a good idea and so similarly the early adopters
see challenges as opportunities the later adopters see challenges as evidence that the
change is a bad idea so implications for this are that the support needed to make the change
successful
shifts a lot from the early adopters to the later adopters the early adopters are really
self motivated they don't require very much support often you really have to keep them
from diving headlong into a new area far from needing to provide support the later adopters
though require support ranging from moderate levels of support to really high levels of
support so let's take a look at differences in the support needed for earlier vs later
adopters the innovators and early
adopters need permission to try the change maybe a lot of times they don't need permission
or they don't think they need to because they're so eager to try the thing that's new on the
other hand the later adopters actually do need explicit permission and encouragement
to try the change you might have to tell them quite a few times that not only is it ok to
try to change but you want them to try the
change your going to support them in making the change and so on they also need incentives
to try the change they are not motivated by a change for the sake of change they want
to know what is the benefit to them they are going to need training support because they
don't have the same level of motivation in seeking out online resources and user groups
and discussions with peers they're gonna need some more support in actually getting spun
up to
be able and capable of doing the change they might need consulting support as well so really
collectively what we really need or what we're really finding is that the later adopters
need a lot of support in adopting the change in making it be successful and so we find
in organizations is that the pattern here is that the experience with early adopters
is misleading about how much support the organization as a whole is going to need to be successful
as we get
into the later adopters and this is critical because the later adopters actually make up
the majority of the adopters that you need for a successful transformation if we go back
and look at this diagram this isn't just drawn as a bell curve for the sake of making nice-looking
diagram it's drawn as a bell curve because these proportions are meant to be taken literally
what that means is that the leftmost two groups
make up about 15 percent of the total number of adopters in the organization so as we look
at our staff profile over time for transformation the early adopters adopt early they make up
15 percent if our transformation is successful the later adopters by the time they all adopt
it make up 85 percent of the total adopters and if we look at the level of support needed
for these groups what we see is that the early adopters need very little support later
adopters need much higher support and the problem organizations run into is that they
tend to make their transformation plans after the pilot project is completed when we really
only have early adopters having adopted the innovation and the implication is that we
think we actually expect a low level of support is needed because we're over generalizing
from the experience with the earlier adopters so in general organizations end up being
really overly optimistic about the level of support needed for the last eighty-five percent
of the transformation to make the agile transformation successful so to summarize early adopters
make it look easy and in some sense that's not a compliment or at least it's problematic
that is to say they make it look easy and create a misleading idea of the level of support
that the organization is going to need to put in place to make
the transformation successful across the entire group of people who need to complete the adoption
later adopters make up the vast majority of staff you need to reach for successful adoption
and they need more kinds of support and deeper levels of support then the early adopters
do we see a lot of Agile transformations stumble or fail due to over generalizing from experience
with pilot projects that are staffed with a category of staff that is not
representative of the staff of the organization as a whole and the support needed as described
in the companion talk on the change model which goes through the details of the various
kinds of support that you need to put in place to make an Agile transformation successful
so that's really the adoption model check out the companion talk on the change model
and that should give you some pretty good support for
understanding what's really needed to make an Agile transformation successful